Abstract:

Development in technology is rapid, and same can be said particularly in the telecommunication industry, which has experienced an explosive growth both in the massive adoption rate of smart mobile devices and in the huge volume of data traffic generated daily in the recent time. Mobile devices have become extremely smart and used for purposes other than making calls and text messages, making it become an integral part of everyday human life. But while we celebrate this technological achievement, attacks on them have also increasingly become alarming such that our sensitive data transported over the wireless network are not only unsafe, but can easily be illegally requested for by an unauthorized device, also participating invisibly in the network.

We briefly studied the security features available in different generations of mobile communication technologies i.e 2G, 3G, and 4G, with the aim of understanding how fake base station attacks practically occur, and to understand the effect of exposing certain parameters such as IMEI/IMSI, LAC/CID to a third party, usually an intruder.

This work focuses on proposing a detection methodology as a mitigating approach to lessen fake base station attack in a cellular network. A fake base station is an attacking equipment solely used to duplicate a legitimate base station. While we acknowledge that the strategy of attack depends on the type of network, our approach is based on finding dissimilarities in parameters such as the received signal strengths, and existence of base stations participating in a network, from two different database systems. With this set of information, it is possible to arrive at a conclusion to state if a transmitting device is suspicious or legitimate. We present our detecting and mitigating algorithm which is the objective of this work.